This proceeding is more accurately named: “Preempting state laws to allow shutting off of copper wire services so that the companies can get rid of any State Telecom Utility obligations, (and the unions) and only provide inferior wireless services (in place of a fiber optic wire to the home)— so Telecom companies can make more money”.

At the same time, the Telecom companies and the FCC will make outrageous claims about the future of “5G”, a wireless service that does not exist today and may never work as advertised. Ironically, “4G+1G HYPE” requires a fiber optic wire every block or two; these fiber optic wires could be extended to every home or business, but the Telecom companies don’t want to do that: they make more money for data-capped, unregulated Wireless services.

Once the FCC gets rid of Net Neutrality and privacy restrictions, the plan is to beef up the ad-tech to track you on all devices and sell the information. Keeping with their ‘say anything’ playbook, by using the magical terms ‘broadband’, ‘Internet’, ‘Digital Divide’, ‘revolution’ and ‘new tech’ as political carrots, the Telecom companies continue to get even more subsidies and help from the government.

This is what the FCC and the Telecom companies have planned. We are advocating for a very different future. We are asking every state, every city and every citizen to demand that the FCC stop the current series of proceedings to ‘shut off the copper’ and preempt state laws and — instead — request that the FCC start audits and investigations into the Agency’s own cost accounting rules and the massive financial cross-subsidies that its own rules have created.

At the same time, we are asking every state, every city and every citizen to request that the State Utility commissions, Attorneys General and Advocate offices start state-based audits and investigations, as has been going on at the NY Public Service Commission (NYPSC), which has been examining Verizon-NY’s quality of service issues and financial cross-subsidies: illegally transferring funds from Verizon-NY (the State Telecommunications Utility) to Verizon Wireless and other unregulated Verizon subsidiaries.

In fact, Verizon has recently started to discuss a settlement, which we will address in an upcoming post. We summarized our analysis in a new report: “Verizon New York 2016 Annual Report: Follow the Money: Financial Analysis and Implications” — which we filed in our comments at the FCC.

History shows that this tired strategy of reducing Telecom regulation has not worked to increase Wireline competition and none of the FCC, the State Utility Commissions, AT&T, Verizon and CenturyLink — or their co-opted groups, think tanks and experts — have ever publicly discussed this fact. We placed the entire book “The Book of Broken Promises” into the public record at the FCC to prove that the FCC et al. is clueless or in denial about

the history of Broadband and the Internet

the hundreds of billions of dollars in investment incentives that were given, over and over, to what is now AT&T, Verizon and CenturyLink to upgrade the copper wires to fiber optics.

The FCC should be asking:

Why is most of America’s telecommunications infrastructure still based on the aging copper wires and not fiber optic wires?

Where did all the money go?

The IRREGULATORS is convinced that the FCC needs to be taken to court over the decision they will make in this proceeding and we hope that commenters, organizations, cities and state organizations, and citizens will join us.

In fact, based on history, we file this knowing that this FCC will not take any action based on our filings, will ignore basic facts and documentation that refute their plans and has been doing this long before this proceeding. The FCC refuses to take seriously any of the data and facts we’ve presented in our previous filings, including the recent report submitted that used the Verizon New York 2016 Annual Report as the foundation of our analysis.

In short, the FCC has been working for the industry, not the public interest.The FCC’s goal is to remove basic consumer protections, free AT&T, Verizon et al. from any obligations of offering service, and erase the basic cost accounting rules instead of auditing the impacts of their rules.